


Moonshine

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Justified
Genre: 1980s, Episode: s01e01 Pilot, M/M, Moonshine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-08-13 19:40:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20179645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: Harlan stills pour out alcohol that takes root in the stomach and pins you to its earth.





	Moonshine

**Author's Note:**

> acorrespondence prompted this brilliant prompt, "Okay but somebody once made a post about Mags giving Loretta the cider and Loretta accepting being an analogue of Persephone accepting the pomegranate seeds without knowing what would happen, and now I can’t stop thinking about Boyd giving Raylan the moonshine when he first shows up. Is this a prompt? I don’t know. But if Harlan stills pour out alcohol that takes root in the stomach and pins you to its earth, does Raylan know? Would he take the drink if he did? Could he turn down the challenge?"
> 
> And so here are some musings on that front.

Raylan never drinks moonshine. Not when his granddaddy brews it, not when Johnny Crowder sneaks it into a baseball game and all the boys imbibe. He’ll take a cheap beer when it’s handed to him, sure enough, drinks the Jim Beam that Boyd’s sticky fingers lift from the liquor store, but he never touches moonshine.

The boys on the team try to goad him into it, call him a lightweight, taunt him for being a pussy who can’t take a bit of ‘shine. Raylan never bends, though. Raylan never takes a drink that ain’t from a bottle or a can. The boys try to trick him into some spiked punch, but Raylan takes the cup and pours the moonshine out, back into the Harlan soil from which it came.

Boyd doesn’t stoop so low. Boyd steals liquor that comes sealed at the store, watches Raylan’s throat work as he tilts the bottle back and swallows it down. Boyd starts at the mine the summer before their senior year and finds Raylan waiting for him more often than not, pacing the parking lot and holding onto his keys so tightly they leave grooves in his palm. Raylan drives them to a puddle, and Boyd only ever buys Raylan something sealed well outside Harlan’s county lines.

(Boyd goes to Mags Bennett a year before Raylan severs all their Bennett relations with one trenchant swing. He builds the still slowly, piece by piece in the shed in his backyard. Mags don’t have much to share with a Crowder tad, but Boyd’s always been good at peering around corners and crouching under eaves.)

He offers Raylan the moonshine after the mine caves in, after catching Raylan’s hand and squeezing tight enough to feel the marks left by Raylan’s keys a year before, after running for their lives. It’s the only batch he’s ever brewed. Raylan shows up at his door that night, and Boyd holds out the jar, and Raylan shakes his head so hard that coal dust clouds around him, Raylan catches Boyd’s face between his hands and severs himself from Harlan with a kiss, presses himself to Boyd until Boyd’s dizzy with it, until he can’t breathe to goad Raylan into taking a sip, until he can’t breathe to taunt Raylan for his tears.

Raylan goes. Boyd drinks the whole jar. (It’s why Kuwait doesn’t kill him. Boyd Crowder’s promised himself to a different land.)

He packs up the still, when he comes home from the war. He moves it to his house on the ridge, has Bowman pack it up and keep it safe while he’s inside. He moves it to the church, after he comes out, keeps brewing moonshine and drinking it down. He never shares the moonshine. He gives the boys that gather round him Jim Beam, or Jack, or moonshine he buys from Silas up in the hills. He keeps his ‘shine separate for twenty years.

Then a town car pulls into the drive, and Boyd sends Devil for the glasses, fetches the jar from his own supply. He fills the glass to brimming. He extends his hand. And for a moment he falls into a night twenty years past, a boy with a jar of moonshine and Raylan Givens covered in coal dust and standing before him, Raylan Givens pressing him close and drinking him down.

Raylan takes the glass. Raylan watches Boyd watching him, his gaze steady and his hand steady as he pours the moonshine down his throat. He chokes a little. Harlan never was easy to take. Raylan keeps his eyes on Boyd, Raylan tips the glass back and swallows every last drop. Boyd watches Raylan’s throat work until he’s dizzy with it, until he can’t do aught besides marvel at Raylan’s smile.

Raylan shoots him through the chest, the next evening over dinner, but blood spilled across the dining room floor ain’t no match for moonshine brewed from Harlan’s black earth. Raylan swears he’s leaving, drinks himself into a stupor to wash the taste of moonshine from his mouth, peregrinates to distant shores just to prove he can. But he always returns. He grasps his keys tight enough to imprint their lines in his palms. He paces his way back to Boyd.

(And maybe there ain’t no alchemy in moonshine. Maybe it’s nothing but corn and water and a still, and it don’t matter where it’s brewed or whose hand is in the pot. Maybe the stories are nothing but superstition from the hills.

Maybe that’s true. But Raylan keeps his promises, all the same.)


End file.
